Development Update #24

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the twenty-fourth development update for Haunted: Att... Wait a minute, something's not quite right here.  This update isn't about Haunted: Attack of the Dead Men at all!  It's just a shameless plug for my next game!

While this isn't really a regular update, and isn't about Haunted in particular, I thought it was time to share what I have been doing for the past few months.  As I've mentioned a number of times before, I don't have as much spare time to work on game development as I used to.  That has left me in a slightly awkward spot regarding the various promises I've made about updates for Haunted, as I've realised that I simply can't keep many of them - at least, not for now.

Having thought about it a lot, I've decided that for the next few years I would much rather try something new.  Two years is a long time to work on the same thing every day, and Haunted was in development for longer than that.  It was a very ambitious project, especially considering I'd never released a full game before, and so I'd never had the chance to learn more about the process and what it takes to actually complete a game.  As a part of this thought process, I realised that to get Haunted into the shape it deserves, a lot more work needs to be put into it - and I mean a lot.  I'm talking redesigning levels from scratch kind of work, not something that can be done in a few small, sporadic updates.  I would like to do all of this one day, but given how much time it will take I would rather leave it for now and come back to it fresh, complete with new knowledge and skills that I will undoubtedly gain from working on something else for a while.

I understand that this will be disappointing for some amongst my (admittedly small) audience.  But not to worry, because there is a new project to follow - my next game, Station 015!  For the time being, I will only record my progress on this new project here on itch.io - it is still only a prototype at the moment, and an incomplete one at that.  I will create a Steam page for it early next year once there is something to actually make available to players (after all, $100 is a lot to gamble on something that may never go anywhere), but for now you can read the first announcement post here.  The development updates for Station 015 won't be as regular as the ones for Haunted - not for now anyway - but I do plan to cover the technical details of the new features I've been developing for it, and how the things I've learned from Haunted has influenced them.

But that's it for now.  As always, thanks for reading!